In modern society, personal information can be acquired from various organizations. Health, finance, and for-profit organizations such as hospitals, research laboratories, banks, insurance companies, retailers, and the like possess information that can be used for research, development, marketing, and other business purposes. However, it has been realized that personal privacy related to such date should be protected. In particular, information on personal health or personal financial conditions has high confidentiality.
Although certified organizations possess personal information, use of the personal information requires authorization of a national organization or can only be extremely restrictively used. However, as computer technology development has advanced, personal information has been publicly leaked by criminal conduct such as hacking, and the illegally accessed personal information has been wrongfully used for other criminal conduct.
Recently, a need for analysis of personal information has increased due to advances of big data-related technology. For data analysis, data a plurality of sources needs to be accessed in many cases. In research to determine an effect of a specific drug treatment, for example, records to be accessed are owned and managed by a group of people or a group of pharmacies who have prescribed the drug. In spite of an abundant flood of information, however, a compromise on a paradigm of personal information protection is needed to extract useful results by analyzing the information.
In particular, information related to infection by a disease not only corresponds to extremely personal information but it is also absolutely prohibited for any person to distribute or spread the personal information, excluding a person bound by confidentiality obligation from legislation on personal information protection. On the contrary, a system that can predict and alert disease infection is obviously needed for public benefit.